What is Clinical/Rehab Pilates?

Clinical Pilates is a specialized form of Pilates used for chronic pain management, injury prevention, and rehab. Clinical Pilates is effective because it is based on the advanced BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL approach to pain. Together with individual and targeted rehabilitative exercises this helps you to alleviate pain, regulate your nervous system, and retrain your muscle memory.

What Is Causing Your Pain?

Pain can be described as acute or chronic depending on its duration. You know that a broken bone, strained muscle, or sprained ligament can cause pain. This is acute pain; it happens quickly, and the pain goes away when the body heals itself. For example, we need 3-4 weeks for a muscle to heal, 6-8 weeks for a bone to heal, and 12-18 months for ligaments, tendons, and discs to heal. If you have had your pain for longer than this, it is called chronic pain. Chronic pain lasts longer than the time taken for your injury to heal, so it is very safe to say that tissue damage is not the cause of your pain.

Even if you have recently had an MRI, ultrasound, or X-ray and have been told that you have scoliosis, herniated disc, or degeneration of some kind, we know that each of those conditions also occurs in pain-free people. They are most likely not the cause of your chronic pain.

So, what is causing your pain?

Science is clear that sometimes due to no fault of our own our nervous system can become overloaded, hypersensitive, and unregulated. This can cause the pain systems in our body to send pain signals long after our injury has healed. Different factors can affect our nervous system. To treat your chronic pain, it is important to have a comprehensive plan to address ALL of the factors that are contributing to it – not just some of them! By treating the underlying cause of your pain and not just the symptoms, your recovery will be more complete and permanent.

How Can BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL Approach to Pain Help Me?

The biopsychosocial model of pain helps us to consider not only biological and biomechanical causes of pain but also different psycho/social stressors that overload our nervous system, making it hypersensitive and unregulated. The goal is to de-stress, regulate, and retrain the nervous system so that when we move or are exposed to certain stressors, our bodies will not perceive it as a threat and start producing pain to protect us. Retraining our nervous system requires active movement! This is very important to understand. You need to be actively, and consciously moving in order for your nervous system to learn something new, form new neural pathways, and create lasting change in the functioning of your nervous system.

How is This Approach Superior to Other Treatments?

The reason most passive therapies and pain treatments do not produce lasting results is that during the treatment, you are not moving! They only address the symptoms and not the cause of why you hurt. Passive treatments can’t create any lasting changes in your nervous system to permanently help you. They also neglect to consider the psycho/social factors that are known contributors to chronic pain.

How Can We Help You?

Don’t Take Our Word For It, Take Theirs